In this Sunday, June 17, 2018 photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who were taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) ORG XMIT: NY349(Photo: U.S. Border Protection via AP)

The author of the referenced letter pointed out differences between his family's experience of the Nazi genocide and what is currently happening to Central American families seeking asylum.

Fine, drop the rhetoric. Let's stick to facts and then take action.

Recently I have attended rallies in support of refugee families in Riverside, Otay Mesa, and Palm Springs. I learned that:

in the Adelanto detention center, immigrants not convicted of any felony are held, without due process, in unsanitary conditions;

parents trying to reunite with their children have been given a terrible choice between having their children or giving up their asylum cases;

as many as 3,000 children have been separated from their parents and are scattered throughout the U.S.

"Tent cities" meet the legal definition of concentration camps: places of mass detention of civilians, without trial. Our taxes pay for all this.

If we don't want our government to be compared to the Nazi regime, let's demand changes. Families belong together – and not in detention.

Janet Weil, Palm Springs

Undocumented entry has consequences

Why do we have to arrest illegal migrants? There’s a better solution. It goes like this:

As they cross our borders illegally, the military/Border Patrol, put ALL of them on a bus. (we’ll need a bunch of buses). While on the bus, they are fingerprinted, swabbed for DNA, and photographed – all of them ages 12 and older (kids grow up).

Then, we drive them back across the border. We give them a bottle of water, a box lunch, and tell them “We have all your information and if you come back here again, illegally, you will go directly to jail, as you will have committed a felony.”

Why do we have to arrest them, feed them, clothe them, shelter them for months on end waiting to hear a judge? They have already broken our laws.

In its efforts to present the public with both sides of current issues The Desert Sun offers us many examples of the defensiveness of Trump supporters.

Recently, we have had a mini avalanche of talking points about the immigration debacle created by the administration in its efforts to follow through on its campaign promise to "deport them all!"

The sad facts as presented in courtroom testimony, by video and by the words of the administration itself completely undermine any credibility to the notion that the administration had any plan in place other than one of calculated cruelty and haste.

Court testimony proved that the administration had no plan to track children. Court records show a pattern of ignoring department policy and law in the handling of asylum cases. Trump himself has tweeted repeatedly about ignoring the Constitution in executing his policy.

This from an administration that loves to talk about the sanctity of laws.

Yet we get rationalizations, excuses and victim blaming from Trump apologists.

Maybe we need to ask our German friends what happened when they last saw this pattern.

Indiana Thomas, Cathedral City

Outrageous outages

I have been living in the Cathedral City cove for 2.5 years now. In my 30 years of home ownership, I have never been subjected to multiple day-long power outages for a utility to do upgrades, but that's exactly what I've seen twice now in the last three months from SCE. More are coming to our neighborhood in July and August.

We've been very patient until now and lived with the inconvenience since it was not mid-summer. However, it is simply unacceptable to turn the power off ON PURPOSE here in 110-plus-degree temperatures. I work out of the home and I can't afford to relocate somewhere else for a whole day, not to mention the damage to our home and its contents (especially perishables) for such an outage in these temperatures.

A lot of the people here in the cove are older and really don't need to suffer more all-day outages in this heat.

SCE is intractable and all I get when I call them is that they have a right to do this whenever they want. We need help from people in a position of authority to put a stop to this. It's simply not right.

Michael Lange, Cathedral City

There are options to the plastic straw, a Desert Sun reader writes.(Photo: Caitlin Russo)

Oh my! There are so many choices when choosing a straw by which to sip your drink.

No paper straws? No problem. There is absolutely no reason that you must be subject to the state of California’s legislative bonehead ideals, non-biodegradable plastic-waste-reducing environmental activists or a restaurant’s supply choice.

The over 4,000-year human history of drinking straw activity reveals numerous creative materials and forms that have incarnated. Consider: stainless steel, bamboo, tubes of glass, licorice candy, titanium, even gold inlaid with lapis lazuli, entertaining Crazy Straws, temperature inversion thermochromic straws which come in a variety of inner diameters – 3 to 15 millimeters – for ease in beverage consumption. The popular one-use plastic straw fashioned from petroleum, in essence old disgusting squished decomposed dinosaur bones mixed with colorants and plasticizers, is just the latest in the drinking straw invention cycle.

So, you see, if you do not like the one-use straw that is provided for your convenience by the business establishment where you drink, you can get around that distastefulness by bringing your own preferred sanitary drinking straw with you. After reading your letter it’s abundantly clear who is the whiny bonehead.

ijil Rainbow Hawk Giver, Indio

More than immigration issue here

I was appalled to read coverage of a local physician, pediatrician Javier Hernandez, being indignant and uncooperative when stopped by a Border Patrol agent last week in Coachella for allegedly driving 100 miles per hour.

Dr. Hernandez challenged the jurisdiction of the Border Patrol to make such a traffic stop, and he may well have been correct. But there is a greater issue here.

Totally missing in The Desert Sun and local TV coverage was Dr. Hernandez's failure to acknowledge any responsibility for driving at a dangerous speed.

Since no radar was used, he instead questioned how the Border Patrol agent could attest to the 100-mph speed. But even if Dr. Hernandez was "only" doing 80 or 90, it's still illegal speeding – and dangerous to himself and others.

Shame on Dr. Hernandez for his indifference and risk to others. Such arrogance is disgusting, and is an embarrassment to the medical profession.